London Heathrow Airport (LHR) Abuse Report

In this day at this hour, I was on my way to catch a flight to São Paulo (after vacationing in Europe). I was accompanied by my boyfriend. We were going from terminal 5 (where our flight from Brussels landed) to terminal 3. I had a very short layover time (1,5 hour) and I had about 30 minutes to get to the departure gate. I was carrying my backpack and a beer case that I bought on the Duty Free in Brussels (which was perfectly sealed in a plastic bag). When I got to the x-ray security area, after showing my brazilian passport (I also have an Italian passport), two officials, a young woman and an older Indian-looking man, opened the sealed duty free bag and slowly started to inspect the bottles. I told them I had about 20 min to catch my plane, but they continued to inspect my belongings. There was a can of mushroom soup in my backpack and the older man was going on about it, saying that he had to put it in some kind of machine for checking, but he did’t know how to use the machine and had to call for a manager that wasn’t on site. I was desperate, I only had about 10 minutes to go to the gate and catch my flight. I implored the older man to throw the can of soup away and let me go, but he said he had to wait for the manager to check it and only then he would let me go. I tried to talk to other officials, but nobody cared about my problem. Nobody cared that I was really close to missing my flight back to Brasil. I felt attacked and bullied. I wonder if they would have treated me this way if I had shown them my Italian passport. All of this took about 20 minutes and we nearly missed our flight. This incident also delayed several people who were behind me on the line for the security check.

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